The victory of Santa Clara was thus due to the many talents of Che Guevara, but also to a fortunate (though far from random) convergence of circumstances, which did not necessarily stem from his virtues as a military leader. Absent these circumstances, the Argentine’s military acumen would doubtless have played a lesser role. A misunderstanding of this delicate balance and an overestimation of Che’s military prowess would prove fateful in his life and death. With its corollary overemphasis on the struggle’s military aspects, this faulty interpretation would also prove disastrous for the prospects of revolution in Latin America. Both fallacies were unavoidable, once the leaders of the 26th of July Movement were caught up in the whirlwind of that memorable New Year’s Day of 1959, when history for once smiled upon the noble cause of ordinary people. Che was the symbol of that cause and of its victory. He appeared in newsreels and picture magazines, the military commander ready to take Havana by storm. While Castro found himself at the other end of the island plotting strategy, Che was in the trenches, his men tired, wounded, and jubilant like him. In those days of celebration, Guevara was the emblem and the conqueror.
Fidel Castro’s orders were categorical. Che and Camilo were to proceed immediately to Havana. Che would take the military base located at the fortress of La Cabaña, Camilo that of Columbia. The commanders of the 26th of July Movement were to enter the coastal city alone, before anybody else, and wait there for Fidel Castro to conquer Santiago. From there he would embark on his historic march the length of the island, arriving at the capital one week later. Fidel’s instructions were straightforward on another score, as well. His two subordinates were to exclude from the triumphant entry into Havana the Student Directorate, the PSP’s Communists, and other forces like those of Gutiérrez Menoyo. Once there, they were to seize the weapons stored at Havana’s two fortresses.*8 Castro’s specific mission assignments were, however, both devious and dexterous—a complex maneuver by one of the most wily and skillful politicians of the twentieth century.
Carlos Franqui wonders why Castro sent Che to La Cabaña. Columbia was the head and heart of the tyranny and its military power; La Cabaña was a secondary post. Che had taken the armored train and the city of Santa Clara; he was the second leader of the Revolution. Camilo was an outstanding warrior, but nevertheless Che’s lieutenant in the provinces; he had to lead a furious battle against the Yaguajay garrison, 100 kilometers further from Havana than Santa Clara. Che was the right man to take Columbia. Why did Fidel entrust Camilo with the chief mission, and Che with the back-up command?45
None of Che’s or Fidel’s biographers has really explained the caudillo’s decision. Yet it was crucial for the events that followed.*9 Franqui is right: the second most important leader of the Revolution was relegated to a secondary task, while the glory of the first entry into Havana and the capture of Batista’s main headquarters were assigned to a man of indisputable heroism but lesser political importance. There are several possible explanations. The most obvious is the fact that Che was a foreigner. Another, slightly more far-fetched, is that Fidel had already decided to try—and execute— Batista’s partisans at La Cabaña, and needed somebody there who would not hesitate to do so. In this perspective, he also wanted a foreign scapegoat in case there was a bloodbath. Franqui offers another explanation, which is more logical though somewhat confusing. Guevara was the second leader of the Revolution, and the most radical one. To assign him Columbia would have made him even more powerful, which was not in Fidel’s interest for several reasons. Che had an agenda of his own. He had already disobeyed orders by forging a close alliance with the Student Directorate. Furthermore, he was too close to the Communists, which could alienate the Cuban liberals and Americans. Camilo, in contrast, was not a threat to Fidel. He was younger, less experienced, more “fun-loving” than Che. He did not represent any problem for Fidel’s allies, or for his potential enemies. The leader at Fidel’s side during his public appearances was always Camilo. Guevara stayed inside the fortress, far from the limelight.46 In this interpretation, there was no coincidence in the celebrated scene where Fidel addressed the masses at Columbia. As a dove straight from Cuban santería alighted on his shoulder, the caudillo asked the famous question, “¿ Voy bien, Camilo?” (How am I doing, Camilo?) And the guerrilla fighter answered, “Vas bien, Fidel” (You’re doing fine, Fidel).
In any case, Camilo entered Havana on the morning of January 3 to the cheers of a jubilant, adoring population. Che arrived at the capital more discreetly, at dawn of the following day, accompanied only by Aleida and his closest collaborators. He came in as he had fought the war: tired, dirty, uncombed, practically in rags. On January 7, he left for Matanzas to receive Fidel—whom he had not seen since August—on his way to Havana. They entered the capital together aboard a tank, and were received by ecstatic, delirious crowds. The photographs of this meeting between a people and its heroes captivated not only the eye of editors around the world, but the imagination and sympathy of admirers everywhere. Che’s shy smile enraptured thousands, then millions of Cubans, Latin Americans, and citizens of the world who identified him with a revolution that was also theirs. There was no question as to the legitimacy of the guerrilleros’ struggle or the justice of their triumph. Nor was there any doubt as to the freshness, spiritual integrity, and boundless charisma of the bearded young men in olive green. Smiling, talented and ingenious, courageous and pure, they seemed ready to storm any heaven, conquer any winter palace.
It would have taken phenomenal modesty and maturity to avoid the key political and conceptual mistakes that would later prove so costly for Cuba and the entire continent. How could Fidel not be convinced that victory was his, and his alone, amid the cheers of hundreds of thousands of Cubans as they hung, fascinated by his oratorical genius, upon his every word, expression, and gesture? How could he resist the temptations born of the contrast between his youthful boldness and the rancid mediocrity of the old political class, represented in the new government by several cabinet ministers and the president himself, Manuel Urrutía? It was only natural that there should be an imaginary reconstruction of events: “the Sierra” had won, not “the plains”; the 26th of July had done it all, without any important allies; its leaders had carried the day, thanks to their exceptional wisdom and intuition. And Fidel, the líder máximo, had played strictly by the rules, taking power fair and square. The consequences of this assessment of victory were barely perceptible in those days of celebration. Soon, however, as the island paradise began to crumble, the flaws in the simplistic analysis surged forth.
In conceptual terms, the “revisionist” view of the war would reach its highest expression in Che’s later writings, pregnant with his talent and his vision. They would inevitably bear the mark of his worldview and his notion of history, summarized in this stunning declaration addressed to the Argentine writer Ernesto Sabato: “The war transformed us completely. There is no deeper experience for a revolutionary than the act of war; not the isolated act of killing nor of bearing a gun or even of one form or another of combat but the total act of war.”47 There, the many-faceted, complex process of the Sierra would be transformed into a magnificent, straightforward epic that could be repeated anywhere with bravery and integrity. Only Fidel, Che, Raúl, and Camilo had the moral authority to write the official history of the war. Fidel lacked the time, patience, and literary or theoretical penchant. His brother learned and practiced from early on the virtues of silence; for almost forty years he would be the man in the shadows. Camilo had no vocation for writing, and soon ran out of time: he died in November when his plane disappeared over the sea; his body was never recovered. The only one left was Che, who was indeed singularly suited for the task.
But he carried only the cultural and intellectual baggage he had brought with him to Havana. He did not know the capital. The only Cuban city familiar to him was Santa Clara in ruins; the political, intellectual, and cultural life of Havana, among the most vital in Latin America, was totally alien to him
. It was inevitable that he should emphasize those aspects of the war that he had lived firsthand. Military matters, peasant issues, radical ideas would overshadow other concerns in his analysis—not only of Cuba, but of all Latin America:
We have demonstrated that a small group of men who are determined, supported by the people, and without fear of dying … can overcome a regular army. … There is another [lesson] for our brothers in America, economically in the same agrarian category as ourselves, which is that we must make agrarian revolutions, fight in the fields, in the mountains, and from here take the revolution to the cities, not try to make it in the latter without a comprehensive social content.48
Che would maintain this position, though further qualified and refined, until the end of his life. Hence, its impact throughout the continent, and its failure. The Guevarist description of what occurred in Cuba was incomplete, and even false to some extent. He wrongly extrapolated the supposed lessons of Cuba to other latitudes, and ignored one central point: what happens once can rarely be repeated.
This interpretation is based upon a long conversation Che had with Carlos Franqui five years later, in 1964, in which their different approaches to the history of the war became apparent. Guevara attached decisive importance to guerrilla warfare and the countryside; Franqui to politics and the cities. Che focused on how the Student Directorate was decimated in the cities, making the subsequent leadership position of the Sierra unavoidable, while Franqui emphasized the significance of the student movement. Che took shelter in radical ideas and the rules of guerrilla warfare, while Franqui stressed the integrity and importance of the clandestine struggle. Finally, Che underlined the guerrillas’ military action and their role in the army’s surrender. Franqui then replied:
I know, Che, that without the support of the clandestine struggle in ’57 the guerrillas would have been liquidated. Without the organized support of the peasants of the 26th [of July], not that of the other peasants, the Granma nucleus would not have regrouped. Without the arms sent from Santiago and Havana, as your war chronicles acknowledge, Che, without our actions in all the island, which paralyzed the tyrant’s military and repressive apparatus, without the reinforcement of men, medicines, food, without the help of the exiles, the guerrillas alone would not have won.49
After Che’s victory march into Havana with Fidel, the course of events accelerated. On January 7, Che and Aleida moved into an army officer’s residence at La Cabaña. It was his first comfortable home since Buenos Aires. Che’s parents, sister, and brother Juan Martín arrived in Havana on January 9, in a Cubana de Aviatión airplane sent by Camilo Cienfuegos to repatriate the Cuban exiles of Buenos Aires. Che met them at the Rancho Boyeros airport and immediately took them to the Havana Hilton (soon to be renamed the Havana Libre). The family reunion was a happy one, darkened only by uncertainty about Che’s future as expressed in his parents’ questions: What are you going to do? Will you go back to medicine? Why don’t you come home to Argentina?
Two weeks later, Hilda Gadea and their daughter arrived from Lima, anxious to see the Revolution and their new homeland. The situation became more and more tense for him. Aside from his difficult political duties, Guevara had to tend to his Argentine family with their burden of memories and ambivalence, the presence of the two Hildas, and his affair with Aleida. A physical breakdown was almost inevitable. It soon came, along with agonizing inner doubts about his destiny.
A conversation between Che and his father reveals the persistence of his wanderlust: “I myself don’t know where I will lay my bones to rest.”50 Antonio Nuñez Jiménez, who entered La Cabaña with Che and negotiated the Leoncio Vidal garrison capitulation in Santa Clara, recalls the same trait in Guevara:
He told me about it the day we reached Havana, on January 3, 1959, as we penetrated into the fortress of La Cabaña. Crossing the Havana tunnel in a jeep, he said to me: “My mission, my commitment to Fidel ends here, with our entry into Havana, because the agreement I had with Fidel was to participate in Cuba’s guerrilla struggle and then have the freedom of choice to go somewhere else and do what I had done in Cuba.”51
Che’s parents and siblings remained until February 14. His mother, Celia, would return alone on May 1. They thus accompanied their son on February 2, when the Council of Ministers issued a general decree, largely for Che’s benefit, granting Cuban nationality by birth to those foreigners who had spent at least two years fighting the dictatorship. Their extended stay allowed them to appreciate the changes in Ernesto both physically and, especially, psychologically. Che was by now a mature man of almost thirty-one years, with a daughter, two women, and a job to do. His face reflected the intensity and wear of the previous two years. In mid-January he suffered a violent asthma attack which obliged him to leave Havana for many weeks and seek solace at a summer villa near Tarará, not far from the capital.
Before departing he had to supervise, either at close quarters or from his window at La Cabaña, the executions of Batista’s collaborators. Justifiable as these executions may have seemed at the time, they were carried out without respect for due process. Estimates as to their exact number vary, especially for those executions carried out at La Cabaña in the first days of the year. Cables from the United States Embassy, dated January 13 and 14, place the figure at 200.*10 Historians’ and biographers’ estimates range from 200 to 700 victims.†1 Years later, Fidel Castro would place the number executed between 1959 and 1960 at 550. Some took place outside Havana: over 100 were ordered shot in Santiago by Raúl Castro in early January.‡1
After a certain date most of the executions occurred outside Che’s jurisdiction. In mid-January, partly due to a wave of protest from the U.S. media and Senate, Castro decided to hold public trials in the sports stadium of Havana. They became notorious after the sentencing in mid-January of Major Jesús Sosa Blanco, a particularly ruthless Batista functionary in the province of Oriente, and of colonels Grau and Morejon. Though Fidel’s decision was a disaster for the image of the regime, it released Che from any authority over the fate of his prisoners at La Cabaña. He had previously ordered dozens of executions, curiously abetted by Herman Marks, another “internationalist,” a former convict from Milwaukee who had joined Che’s ranks in the Escambray.52
Conflicting views exist of Che’s role in the executions at La Cabaña. Some exiled opposition biographers report that the Argentine enjoyed the rituals of the firing squad, and that he organized them with gusto—though they acknowledge that the orders came from Fidel Castro. Others relate that Guevara suffered at every execution, pardoning as many prisoners as he could—though he did not hesitate to carry out orders when he felt they were justified. This was the case for José Castaiio Quevedo, the head of Batista’s anti-Communist forces. Che sent him before a firing squad despite pleas for his pardon by the Catholic Church and other sectors of Cuban society. In contrast, his behavior regarding Huber Matos was more nuanced. Expelled from the Rebel Army in November 1959, accused of treason by Fidel Castro, and sentenced to thirty years in jail, Matos recalls today, nearly a decade after leaving a Cuban prison, that Guevara
… was in communication with my relatives so they would know that he did not approve of the death penalty for me, that he even thought my problem had been erroneously managed by Fidel. And he suggested that we present an appeal immediately after the conclusion of the trial.*11
Guevara’s responsibility for events at La Cabaña—though it cannot be diminished, as Che himself never tried to do—must nonetheless be seen within the context of the time. There was no bloodbath; nor were innocent people exterminated in any large or even significant numbers. After the excesses of Batista, and the unleashing of passions during those winter months, it is surprising that there were so few abuses and executions. It is also true, however, that Che had no major qualms about the death penalty, or summary and collective trials. He was ready to give his life for his ideals and believed that others should be as well. If the only way to defend the revolution was to exec
ute its enemies, he would not be swayed by any humanitarian or political arguments. He had nothing but contempt for the (doubtless hypocritical) criticism brandished by the press in New York or the establishment in Washington. The revolution took precedence. He never wondered about or agonized over the link between means and ends, past and future actions, historical precedent and harmful consequences for the future.
Guevara’s asthma during this period, reflecting his many conflicts, was far more severe than was usual for him. The triggers, beyond his general physical weakness, may have been the customary ones. Though Che belonged to the winning faction, he had been partly ousted from the slot in the pecking order he deserved. In addition, he was the object of worrisome comments on the part of Fidel Castro. Alternatively, this recurrence of his asthma may simply have reflected his state of exhaustion. He suffered an onset of emphysema, as well as fatigue, weakness, anemia, and stress.*12
As a result, Che moved into a house by the sea at Tarará, twenty kilometers from Havana. It became the center of his political and ideological activities through the spring of 1959; visitors recall his presence there beginning January 17, and he stayed until May.†2 There the so-called Tarará Group began meeting regularly: a sort of shadow government which, parallel to the new regime’s visible authorities, started building an alternate social, political, and economic masterplan.‡2 Though Che was largely bedridden at the beach until early April, as he confessed to his friend Alberto Granado, he was lucid and able to review documents.** Many of the major decisions taken by the revolutionary government during its initial year were first debated in Tarará. It was also there that Che drafted his earliest strictly political writings, beginning with his most famous book (after the Bolivian diary): La guerra de guerrillas, or Guerrilla Warfare in its English translation.
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